A quick word with Ross Noble

Ross Noble

Ross Noble, the mentally freewheeling English comedian who has been the hit of past comedy festivals returns as a headliner all on his own.

How did your stand-up style evolve - a lot of stand ups improvise but you improvise all the way through?

I thought you were going to say, 'But you just take the piss'.

Well you do that as well, don't you?

Yeah, yeah. But initially, before I did stand-up, I used to do a sort of juggling show. And that was one of those things where I quickly realised that being a juggler is not a good thing or something you should be proud of.

Juggling is a handy thing to know how to do though.

Yeah ... if at any point you get taken hostage and the children of your captives need entertaining. But no, when I first started doing stand-up I had a mixture of props and I'd do a juggling trick or whatever and the actual talking was filling the bits in between. So, I never really sat down and went, 'Right, I'm gonna write'. I just thought, 'This is funny'. And I just threw it out there to see what happened. I'd already worked out that if I came up with an idea I could run with it.

And also, I started out in Newcastle, rather than London, and there weren't as many comics in Newcastle, which meant that one week you were doing a five-minute opening spot and the next you were headlining the club.

But in London people would spend two years doing five-minute spots. In Newcastle, there was this necessity to have a high turnover and that just meant rather than desperately trying to write jokes, I'd just go out there and do it.

And also, I spent a few years warming up audiences for pretty much every crap British sitcom you see on the TV, I was standing there with a mic going, 'So, while they're setting up this hilarious scene ... '

At school were you the class clown or the intelligent, quick-witted student?

It was weird because I had problems. I was dyslexic, so from that point of view I was quite a smart kid, but at the same time I was an idiot. I was obviously reasonably intelligent but I was lumped in with the dummies, so I was a bit of both really.

So does it take a special kind of person to be friends with you?

You have to be prepared to never see me ever. It's one of those things, for my wife it's an interesting thing. She's really good because I'll be off on my wah-wah-wah ... and she'll shoot me a look as if to say, 'Can you just stop it now'. I can be on too much. That's the point where I have to go outside and throw the toys to the dogs, so then they get annoyed. - Scott Kara

* Ross Noble performs his new show Noodlemeister at the Civic in Auckland tonight.